(This is the final article in “The Human Story” series. As the sun begins to set on the Second Epoch, these are some of the things we can do if we really want peace, order, and abundance to spread around the world… unlike Atlantis, which closed the First Epoch amid destruction and chaos. — MM)

Like Lakota Ghost Dancers and 2012 Apocalists, there are times I wish that divine forces could sweep away the world’s problems. Scoop up the chosen ones, transform Earth to a paradise, then set us back down gently amid meadows, streams, songbirds, and rich forests.

Impossible dream, that… even for ethereal beings. The world would no longer be a dangerous place, and in order to get along with each other we’d suddenly have to lose our compulsions toward danger and desire. No easy feat. The ethereals would have to unravel each of us biologically, neutralizing the ego, rebalancing the hormones and neurochemicals in a way that we react to our surroundings with trust and empathy and good will, instead of fear and aggression and lust.

In reality, nothing could make these physical bodies and minds of ours suitable for paradise. Short of some radical hormone replacement therapy of celestial proportion, none of us will enjoy true paradise until we’ve shed the physical body and resume living in an astral body.

That has important implications for us.

As far as humans on Earth are concerned, the ball is in our court. Our fate is in our noble-savage hands. We’re children of the Earth, and our mission (which we apparently chose to accept at some spiritual level long ago) is to figure out how to adjust ourselves and our societies in suitable ways to make the Earth a place of peace and order to the greatest extent possible… given our animal nature and the limits imposed on us by a finite, unforgiving physical environment.

That’s our challenge as we approach the end of the Second Epoch: Maximize peace and order on Earth… putting our greatest strengths to use… despite our weaknesses.

Our Personal Fate

At a personal level, of course, the best solution is meditation, in which the ego and most of the hormones shut down as we connect our conscious mind to the eternal oneness of pure love and bliss. (Sounds a little woo-woo, I know, but meditation really does work that way. It lifts our spiritual vibration.) Meditation (and prayer and other inner works) can make our life happier and ensure a grand personal destiny—a paradise home after we die… but let’s face it, our own inner work barely makes a dent on the world at large.

Our Global Fate

At the level of nations and the world as a whole, things are more complicated, involving social, political, economic, and religious systems. To make the world a better place in a sweeping kind of way, these macro systems are the sweeping kinds of areas that need to be looked at and transformed.

Atlantis: That Was Then, This Is Now

The Atlanteans had their successful techniques that might have worked well for them, but they won’t work for us. Different times, different conditions, different people. Their space-time portals, or “Halls of Amenti,” are a good example. The titans of Atlantis (a.k.a sons of men, gods, giants, superhumans…) apparently didn’t procreate from one generation to the next, and they could recharge their physical bodies to live tens of thousands of years by periodically entering the portals. We modern humans live fleeting lives and tend to have lots of kids, so that the world quickly fills up with lots of little people… and soon there are too many mouths to feed. Space-time portals for us modern humans would probably just make matters worse by giving us longer lifespans… and the capacity to have even more kids with more mouths to feed….

Bottom line: We modern humans need solutions appropriate to our lives in these times.

Fortunately, this is a subject that’s preoccupied my thinking for the past 35 years, so I have some ideas about that, which I’m going to share here.

Standards

The main thing we’ll need is a set of standards to help us humans be compatible with each other and with the environment. It certainly worked for the technology industry. Thanks to standards, anyone in the world can talk to just about anyone else in the world, wherever there’s an infrastructure for Internet and cell phones. Standards ensure that phones and computers can exchange information (voice, text, images…) instantly, regardless of distance, cultural differences, political boundaries… or product brand. All high-tech product manufacturers conform to global standards, or else they quickly go out of business because their products don’t work in the global grid.

Incompatibility has been one of the biggest sources of conflict and mistrust in human affairs down through the ages… and standards break down incompatibility. If standards can solve the incompatibility problem in communication technologies, I know for certain they can also break down political, economic, cultural, and religious incompatibilities.

I’ve gone into some depth about standards elsewhere, so I’ll just round up the main ideas here. These are the kinds of standards that can ensure a future of peace, order, and abundance in our world. If we enact them in the near future, our future generations will see the most beautiful epochal sunset imaginable. If we disregard them and continue on the current course, the end of days will be a lot stormier.

A Social Standard. Foster noble values such as love, contentment, honesty, and good will in every person, starting at the youngest age and continuing through life.

That should be at the core of every family and the primary purpose of all schools, taught at a higher priority than conventional curriculum. Within a generation, noble values would be spilling out into societies everywhere. Our savage side would quickly retreat into the shadows of our mind… where it belongs.

A Political Standard (1). Every decision should be made at the lowest possible level, but high enough to take into account the needs and well-being of everyone affected by the decision.

Most decisions in human affairs, day in and day out, are made by individuals. That’s the way it’s always been, and that’s the way it probably will always be. But, as societies get congested and people start bumping into each other and stepping on each other’s toes (metaphorically speaking), larger regulatory groups have to be set up to help sustain peace and order.

It’s time now to transform the United Nations into a sensible world government. Nations would still make most decisions for themselves, and individuals would continue to make most of the decisions within humanity… but a world government would provide a stable umbrella for everyone.

A Political Standard (2). Decision-making bodies should reflect the diversity of the people they represent.

A society of men and women shouldn’t be regulated by a group of men. A society of blacks, whites, and Orientals shouldn’t be regulated by a group of white people. A world of rich and poor shouldn’t be managed by a group of rich people. A world government shouldn’t be run by a bunch of Nazis or Romans or Egyptians or Americans; it should consist of representatives of all nationalities, cultures, and religions. (Say, that sounds kind of like… what… the United Nations?)

An Economic Standard. The Vitality Ratio: redefine a society as a living system composed of people and products; redefine resources as the “food” that societies “eat” (petroleum, iron ore, timber….); and calculate the economic vitality of society using the ratio between 1) the available resources and 2) the resource needs of society. (V=R:N)

Today more than ever, different societies have to contend with economic crises such as inflation, recession, depression, famine, overpopulation, environmental destruction, mass execution, mass emigration, and war. The Vitality Ratio would solve them all. Here it is in a nutshell:

People and products are to a nation what cells and molecules are to a biosystem like the human body. Resources are to a nation what food is to a biosystem.

A nation consumes resources to sustain its system of people and products, just as a person consumes food to sustain the cells and molecules within. The Vitality Ratio would consider all aspects of population (demographics), products (manufacture, recycling, usage…), and resources, and it would track a running ratio between 1) population and products on one side of the equation, and 2) resources on the other.

Someday monitoring the economy of a nation will be as precise as monitoring the vital signs of a patient in a high-tech hospital. The Vitality Ratio is to society, what nutrition and metabolism are to a human being. You simply define society’s needs for oil, fertile farmland, forests, ocean fish, and other resources, and make sure it’s getting an appropriate diet. You monitor a nation’s needs, and adjust the “metabolism” of the nation to be in line with resources… always keeping an eye out for future resource possibilities. And you do it all with a computer network.

Whether it’s adopted or even acknowledged as a useful tool in my lifetime is doubtful, since it’s such a radical departure from mainstream growth economics. (More on that below.) Anyway, there are certain variables within that ratio that, by themselves, ARE of critical concern at this time.

A Population Standard to Adopt Now. Maintain a fertility rate close to 2 in every country.

The fertility rate is the number of children the average woman will bear in her lifetime. If a society maintained a fertility rate of 2, the population would stay about the same over the years, assuming all kids grew up healthy and no one moved in or out of the country. Those would be unreasonable assumptions, of course, so a fertility rate “slightly above 2” or “about 2” would be healthy enough.

Currently, several African nations have fertility rates of 7+, and it’s in those countries that famine, genocide, and bulging refugee camps have become a way of life and gruesome death in recent years. To deny the connection between chronic overpopulation and these perpetual economic catastrophes, a person would have to be blinded by stupidity, ignorance, dogma, ideology, or some other debilitating condition.

Under growth economics, a social system is deemed healthy and vital only when it continues to grow, to use more resources, to produce more products, and to show higher profits, greater value, and more wealth. There’s no consensus among growth economists on how best to manage a nation’s economy. Faced with today’s crisis in Europe, for example, half of them propose “austerity” (reduced government spending), and the other half propose “stimulus” (increased government spending). Simplistic, wishful thinking, at best.

Under the Vitality Ratio, a social system is healthy and vital when there are ample resources to satisfy its needs. Very simple, very natural.

Growth economics is to a nation what cancer is to a biosystem like the human body.

The Vitality Ratio is to a nation what nutrition and metabolism are to a biosystem.

Religious Standards. Adopt a set of global spiritual values that all religions can agree on. My recommendations:

1—Yes, there is one source that’s the source of all.

2—Yes, we each are a part of the source and the source is a part of us, so at the center of our being we are all one.

3—Living by such noble virtues as love, respect, good will, and friendship can bring us peace and joy during our lifetime and beyond… while preoccupation with such savage attitudes as fear, animosity, vengeance, desire, and ill will bring us chaos and unhappiness not just in this lifetime but the next.

4—Know these basic spiritual truths and practice time-proven techniques to foster the noble side. Every religion has such techniques to choose from—prayer, meditation, contemplation….

These four standards would take precedence over the more exclusive religious tenets.

Christians claim to have God’s chosen savior? Fine.

Muslims claim to have God’s chosen prophet? Fine.

Jews claim to be God’s chosen people? Fine.

That’s all fine… as long as they take all that, and all of their other exclusive creeds, and move them gently to the second seat… and put in the driver’s seat a simple set of mutually acceptable standards like the ones above.

Good Luck With All That!

To get these standards in place would take popular, sensible, effective leadership on many fronts. Frankly, I wouldn’t know where to start looking for leaders like that nowadays. Maybe someone knows where they’re hiding… and what their email address is?

If you know, poke ’em on Facebook, tweet ’em… heck, get their attention. 🙂

“The term resource-based economy is used by Venus Project to describe a hypothetical economic system in which, goods, services and information are free. Fresco’s system assumes the earth is abundant with resources and that our current practice of distributing resources through a price system method is irrelevant and counterproductive to our survival.”

I like the idea of a resource-based economy a lot, but considering our tendency as a species to have more and more kids and to consume more and more resources, I’d need to monitor resource availability in relation to resource needs… which could be done with computer networking. Resource needs would be determined mostly by population (how many mouths to feed and lives to sustain) and by per-capita consumption of resources (how many resources the average person consumes).

If you kept a running ratio between those to variables (resource availability and need) and sustained a healthy balance, then I think the Venus Project could flourish.

Mark, I wish I had come across your website much earlier. You have provided me with a wealth of information, most of which confirms and greatly increases what I have learned from a lifetime of private investigations and study, and have given me some excellent leads for further research. To me, your site is a treasure trove. Thank you thank you thank you! If there is anything I can do to help your efforts, I will gladly do so.
Tosca